RACIST SPAM SENT WORLDWIDE BY GERMAN NEO-NAZI PARTY
If you've been getting e -mails with subject lines like "Bloody Self-Justice," "Multi-Kulturel=Multi-Kriminell," or Turkey in the EU -- with a short message saying "read for yourself" and links you're supposed to follow -- then you're the victim of a Sober.Q worm sent to infect your computer by the NPD (German National Party), a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic party that has scored heavily in some parts of the country by preaching racist, anti-immigrant xenophobia. So reports Der Spiegal Online this morning. This brown-shirted worm is attacking computers all over the planet.
Last year, the NPD shook Germany when it got a frightening 9.2% in elections in Saxony, winning representation in the parliament there for the first time ever. This January, the dozen NPD legislators in Saxony caused an international scandal when they disrupted a moment of silence in the parliament to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Allied forces during World War II -- the NPDers walked out, and made statements belittling the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. (The NPD's leaders frequently make anti-Semitic remarks).
The racist spam that has flooded inboxes from Australia to Anaheim with hundreds of thousands of e-mails is designed to boost the NPD's score in elections this coming Sunday in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populated state. The Sober.Q virus, Der Spiegel says, is "the newest version of the Sober virus, a worm that infects address books and sends a copy of itself to all the entries. Various security firms have released warnings that they received hundreds of thousands of Sober.Q emails within the first 24 hours of the virus' outbreak."
Furthermore, "Sober steals mail-addresses from infected computers and distributes itself in the name of any mail-address it can find. Another thing. Sober.Q runs on computers previously infected by an earlier version of the virus, Sober.P, which appeared only a week ago disguised as an email proclaiming free tickets to the Soccer Cup in 2006. That virus, which was able to switch into German or English, was particularly effective in soccer-crazed Germany, which will be hosting the cup matches," Der Spiegel says. (The Register in the U.K. also has a piece on this worm, and Pendagon has a ton of e-mails from readers complaining they've gotten from a dozen to hundreds of these spammed racist e-mails. )
The government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder tried to have the NPD banned as racist two years ago. But the case blew up when it was revealed that many of the NPD's leaders named in the case against it were agents of Schroeder's security services, and that these government moles had initiated some of the provocative, violence-inducing actions that were included in the list of charges the government cited in calling for the party to be outlawed.
The NPD's vote in Saxony last year was, in part, a reaction to the government's attempt to ban it. I've always opposed attempts to ban hate speech or parties that engage in it -- such actions always contributed to the martyrdom complex such extremists always cultivate, bring them attention they would not have received otherwise, and make them attractive to disgruntled, politically illiterate, unemployed youth of the kind who made up Hitler's brownshirted private army, the S.A., whose strong-arm tactics helped bring him to power.
Anti-immigrant campaigns have allowed far right and neo-fascist parties all over Europe to grow by surfing on the Continent-wide new wave of racism, an atmosphere of hate and fear that is also fueled by starkly declining birth rates among the native white populations and intensive breeding by the largely Arab and Turkish immigrants. But let's hope Germans aren't fooled by the NPD next Sunday.
And if you've received one of these Sober.Q e-mails, and clicked on one of the links in them, get your computer disinfected fast -- it means the NPD has turned it into a machine to reproduce and spew their hate.
PROTEST BUSH'S POLICY TOWARD VENEZUELA -- BUY CITGO! My friend Jeff Cohen, the founder of FAIR, has a piece today on Common Dreams, in which he says: "Looking for an easy way to protest Bush foreign policy week after week? And an easy way to help alleviate global poverty? Buy your gasoline at Citgo stations.....Citgo is a U.S. refining and marketing firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela 's state owned oil company. Money you pay to Citgo goes to Venezuela-- not Saudi Arabia or the Middle East.
"There are 14,000 Citgo gas stations in the US. (Click here to find one near you.) By buying your gasoline at Citgo, you are contributing to the billions of dollars that Venezuela's democratic government is using to provide health care, literacy and education, and subsidized food for the majority of Venezuelans." To read Jeff's entire piece, click here.
Posted by Doug Ireland at 08:05 AM | Permalink
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Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners by the Nazi German regime in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Prisoners were coerced into participating: they did not willingly volunteer and there was never informed consent. Typically, the experiments resulted in death, disfigurement or permanent disability, and as such can be considered as examples of medical torture. At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Dr. Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various hazardous experiments which were supposedly designed to help German military personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel that had been injured, and to advance the racial ideology backed by the Third Reich. Dr. Aribert Heim conducted similar medical experiments at Mauthausen. Carl Vaernet is known to have conducted experiments on homosexual prisoners in attempts to cure homosexuality. After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses perpetrated led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics.
Experiments
According to the indictments at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, these experiments included the following:
Experiments on twins
Experiments on twin children in concentration camps were created to show the similarities and differences in the genetics of twins, as well as to see if the human body can be unnaturally manipulated. The central leader of the experiments was Josef Mengele, who from 1943 to 1944 performed experiments on nearly 1,500 sets of imprisoned twins at Auschwitz. Only 100 individuals survived these studies. While attending University of Munich (located in the city that remained one of Adolf Hitler's focal points during the revolution) studying philosophy and medicine with an emphasis on anthropology and paleontology, Mengele stated: "this simple political concept (fascism) finally became the decisive factor in my life". Mengele's new-found admiration for the "simple political concept" led him to mix his studies of medicine and politics as his career choice. Mengele received his PhD for a thesis entitled "Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups", which suggested that a person's race could be identified by the shape of the jaw. The Nazi organization saw his studies as talents, and Mengele was transferred to the German Auschwitz concentration camp located in occupied Poland on May 30, 1943. Contrary to common belief, Mengele was not the only doctor at Auschwitz nor was he even the highest-ranking physician: SS captain Dr. Eduard Wirths was the physician in charge at Auschwitz. There, Mengele organized genetic experiments on twins. The twins were arranged by age and sex and kept in barracks between experiments, which ranged from injection of different chemicals into the eyes of twins to see whether it would change their colour to literally sewing twins together in attempts to create conjoined twins.
Bone, muscle, and nerve transplantation experiments
From about September 1942 to about December 1943 experiments were conducted at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, for the benefit of the German Armed Forces, to study bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, and bone transplantation from one person to another. Sections of bones, muscles, and nerves were removed from the subjects without use of anesthesia. As a result of these operations, many victims suffered intense agony, mutilation, and permanent disability.
Head injury experiments
In the summer of 1942 in Baranowicze, Poland, experiments were conducted in a small building behind the private home occupied by Nazi SD Security Service officer Dr. Wichtmann, in which "a young boy of eleven or twelve [was] strapped to a chair so he could not move. Above him was a mechanized hammer that every few seconds came down upon his head." The boy was driven insane from the torture.
Freezing experiments
In 1941, the Luftwaffe conducted experiments with the intent of discovering means to prevent and treat hypothermia. One study forced subjects to endure a tank of ice water for up to five hours.
"Exitus" (death) table compiled by Dr Sigmund Rascher. The temperatures are given using the Celcius scale. Versuch Nr. (Attempt No.) Wasser- temperatur (Water temperature) Körpertemperatur bei Entfernung aus dem Wasser (Body temperature when removed from the water) Körpertemperatur beim Eintritt des Todes (Body temperature at death) Verweildauer im Wasser (Length of time in water) Eintritt des Todes (Occurrence of death)
5 5.2° 27.7° 27.7° 66' 66'
13 6° 29.2° 29.2° 80' 87'
14 4° 27.8° 27.5° 95' 100'
16 4° 28.7° 26° 60' 74'
23 4.5° 27.8° 25.7° 57' 65'
25 4.5° 27.8° 26.6° 51' 65'
4.2° 26.7° 25.9° 53' 53'
Another study placed prisoners naked in the open air for several hours with temperatures as low as -6°C (21°F). Besides studying the physical effects of cold exposure, the experimenters also assessed different methods of rewarming survivors.
The freezing/hypothermia experiments were conducted for the Nazi high command to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front, as the German forces were ill-prepared for the cold weather they encountered. Many experiments were conducted on captured Russian troops; the Nazis wondered whether their genetics gave them superior resistance to cold. The principal locales were Dachau and Auschwitz. Dr Sigmund Rascher, an SS doctor based at Dachau, reported directly to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and publicised the results of his freezing experiments at the 1942 medical conference entitled "Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter". Approximately 100 people are reported to have died as a result of these experiments.
Malaria experiments
From about February 1942 to about April 1945, experiments were conducted at the Dachau concentration camp in order to investigate immunization for treatment of malaria. Healthy inmates were infected by mosquitoes or by injections of extracts of the mucous glands of female mosquitoes. After contracting the disease, the subjects were treated with various drugs to test their relative efficiency. Over 1,000 people were used in these experiments, and of those, more than half died as a result.
Mustard gas experiments
At various times between September 1939 and April 1945, many experiments were conducted at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, and other camps to investigate the most effective treatment of wounds caused by mustard gas. Test subjects were deliberately exposed to mustard gas and other vesicants (e.g. Lewisite) which inflicted severe chemical burns. The victims' wounds were then tested to find the most effective treatment for the mustard gas burns.
Children of the Bullenhuser Damm show incisions where axillary lymph nodes had been surgically removed after they were deliberately infected with tuberculosis at Neuengamme. In a "cover-up" operation, all were murdered with their 4 adult Jewish caretakers and 6 Red Army POWs in the basement of the school on April 20, 1945 as British forces approached.
Sulfonamide experiments
From about July 1942 to about September 1943, experiments to investigate the effectiveness of sulfonamide, a synthetic antimicrobial agent, were conducted at Ravensbrück. Wounds inflicted on the subjects were infected with bacteria such as Streptococcus, Clostridium perfringens (the causative agent in gas gangrene) and Clostridium tetani, the causative agent in tetanus. Circulation of blood was interrupted by tying off blood vessels at both ends of the wound to create a condition similar to that of a battlefield wound. Infection was aggravated by forcing wood shavings and ground glass into the wounds. The infection was treated with sulfonamide and other drugs to determine their effectiveness.
Sea water experiments
From about July 1944 to about September 1944, experiments were conducted at the Dachau concentration camp to study various methods of making sea water drinkable. At one point, a group of roughly 90 Roma were deprived of food and given nothing but sea water to drink by Dr. Hans Eppinger, leaving them gravely injured. They were so dehydrated that others observed them licking freshly mopped floors in an attempt to get drinkable water.
Sterilization experiments
From about March 1941 to about January 1945, sterilization experiments were conducted at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and other places by Dr. Carl Clauberg. The purpose of these experiments was to develop a method of sterilization which would be suitable for sterilizing millions of people with a minimum of time and effort. These experiments were conducted by means of X-ray, surgery and various drugs. Thousands of victims were sterilized. Aside from its experimentation, the Nazi government sterilized around 400,000 individuals as part of its compulsory sterilization program. Intravenous injections of solutions speculated to contain iodine and silver nitrate were successful, but had unwanted side effects such as vaginal bleeding, severe abdominal pain, and cervical cancer. Therefore, radiation treatment became the favored choice of sterilization. Specific amounts of exposure to radiation destroyed a person’s ability to produce ova or sperm. The radiation was administered through deception. Prisoners were brought into a room and asked to complete forms, which took two to three minutes. In this time, the radiation treatment was administered and, unknown to the prisoners, they were rendered completely sterile. Many suffered severe radiation burns.
Experiments with poison
Somewhere between December 1943 and October 1944, experiments were conducted at Buchenwald to investigate the effect of various poisons. The poisons were secretly administered to experimental subjects in their food. The victims died as a result of the poison or were killed immediately in order to permit autopsies. In September 1944, experimental subjects were shot with poisonous bullets, suffered torture and often died.
Incendiary bomb experiments
From around November 1943 to around January 1944, experiments were conducted at Buchenwald to test the effect of various pharmaceutical preparations on phosphorus burns. These burns were inflicted on prisoners using phosphorus material extracted from incendiary bombs.
High altitude experiments
Further information: Hubertus Strughold
In early 1942, prisoners at Dachau concentration camp were used by Rascher in experiments to aid German pilots who had to eject at high altitudes. A low-pressure chamber containing these prisoners was used to simulate conditions at altitudes of up to 20,000 m (66,000 ft). It was rumored that Rascher performed vivisections on the brains of victims who survived the initial experiment. Of the 200 subjects, 80 died outright, and the others were executed.
Aftermath
Many of the subjects died as a result of the experiments conducted by the Nazis, while many others were murdered after the tests were completed to study the effect post mortem. Those who survived were often left mutilated, suffering permanent disability, weakened bodies, and mental distress. On August 19, 1947, the doctors captured by Allied forces were put on trial in USA vs. Karl Brandt et al., which is commonly known as the Doctors' Trial. At the trial, several of the doctors argued in their defense that there was no international law regarding medical experimentation.
The issue of informed consent had previously been controversial in German medicine in 1900, when Dr. Albert Neisser infected patients (mainly prostitutes) with syphilis without their consent. Despite Neisser's support from most of the academic community, public opinion, led by psychiatrist Albert Moll, was against Neisser. While Neisser went on to be fined by the Royal Disciplinary Court, Moll developed "a legally based, positivistic contract theory of the patient-doctor relationship" that was not adopted into German law. Eventually, the minister for religious, educational, and medical affairs issued a directive stating that medical interventions other than for diagnosis, healing, and immunization were excluded under all circumstances if "the human subject was a minor or not competent for other reasons" or if the subject had not given his or her "unambiguous consent" after a "proper explanation of the possible negative consequences" of the intervention, though this was not legally binding.
In response, Drs. Leo Alexander and Andrew Conway Ivy drafted a ten point memorandum entitled Permissible Medical Experiment that went on to be known as the Nuremberg Code. The code calls for such standards as voluntary consent of patients, avoidance of unnecessary pain and suffering, and that there must be a belief that the experimentation will not end in death or disability. The Code was not cited in any of the findings against the defendants and never made it into either German or American medical law.
Modern ethical issues
Contemporary knowledge concerning the manner in which the human body reacts to freezing is based almost exclusively on these Nazi experiments. This, together with the recent use of data from Nazi research into the effects of phosgene gas, has proven controversial and presents an ethical dilemma for modern physicians who do not agree with the methods used to obtain this data. Similarly, controversy has arisen from the use of results of biological warfare testing done by the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731. However, the results from Unit 731 were kept classified by the United States and the majority of doctors involved were given pardons.
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dr. Josef Mengele the angel of death 1/6
Josef Rudolf Mengele (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈʁuːdɔlf ˈmɛŋɡələ], March 16, 1911 – February 7, 1979), also known as the Angel of Death (German: Todesengel), was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University. He initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, but is far more infamous for performing grisly human experiments on camp inmates, including children, for which Mengele was called the "Angel of Death."
In 1940, he was placed in the reserve medical corps, after which he served with the 5th SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking in the Eastern Front. In 1942, he was wounded at the Soviet front and was pronounced medically unfit for combat, and was then promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) for saving the lives of three German soldiers. He survived the war, and after a period living incognito in Germany he fled to South America, where he evaded capture for the rest of his life despite being hunted as a Nazi war criminal.
Early life and family
Josef Mengele was born the eldest of three children to Karl and Walburga (née Hupfauer) Mengele in Günzburg, Bavaria, Germany. His younger brothers were Karl Junior and Alois Mengele. Mengele's father was a founder of the Karl Mengele & Sons company, a company that produced farm machinery for milling, sawing, and baling. In 1935, Mengele earned a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Munich. In January 1937, at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, he became the assistant to Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was a leading scientist mostly known for his research in genetics with a particular interest in twins. From this association, Mengele probably developed his life-long fascination with the study of twins. In addition Mengele studied under Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, who had been involved in medical experiments on the Herero tribe in South-West Africa, now Namibia. On July 28, 1939, Mengele married Irene Schönbein, whom he had met while studying in Leipzig. Their only son, Rolf, was born March 11, 1941. Five years after Mengele emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1949, his wife Irene divorced him. She continued to live in Germany with their son. On July 25, 1958, in Nueva Helvecia, Uruguay, Mengele was remarried to Martha Mengele, the widow of his younger brother Karl. Martha Mengele had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1956 with Karl-Heinz, her son from her first marriage. Josef and Martha had no further children.
Military service
In 1937 Mengele joined the Nazi Party. In 1938 he received his medical degree and joined the SS. Mengele was conscripted into the army in 1940 and later volunteered to the medical service of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, where he distinguished himself as a soldier. Hitler declared war against the Soviet Union on 22nd June 1941. Later that month Mengele was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class for his heroism at the Ukrainian Front. In January 1942, while serving with the SS Wiking Division behind Soviet lines, he pulled two German soldiers from a burning tank, and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class as well as the Wound Badge in Black and the Medal for the Care of the German People. Mengele was wounded during this campaign; since he was medically unfit for combat, Mengele was posted to the Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin. Mengele resumed an association with his mentor, von Verschuer, who was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin. Just before he was transferred to Auschwitz, Mengele was promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) in April 1943.
Auschwitz
In May 1943, Mengele replaced another doctor who had fallen ill at the Nazi extermination camp Birkenau. On May 24, 1943, he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's "Gypsy camp". In August 1944, this camp was liquidated and all its inmates gassed. Subsequently Mengele became Chief Medical Officer of the main infirmary camp at Birkenau. He was not the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz, though: his superior was SS-Standortarzt (garrison physician) Eduard Wirths.
During his 21-month stay at Auschwitz, Mengele earned the sobriquet "Angel of Death" for the cruelty he visited upon prisoners. Mengele was referred to as "der weiße Engel" ("the White Angel") by camp inmates because when he stood on the platform inspecting new arrivals and directing some to the right, some to the left (the gas chambers), his white coat and white arms outstretched evoked the image of a white angel. Mengele took turns with the other SS physicians at Auschwitz in meeting incoming prisoners at the camp, where it was determined who would be retained for work and who would be sent to the gas chambers immediately. In one instance, he drew a line on the wall of the children's block 150 centimetres (about 5 feet) from the floor, and children whose heads could not reach the line were sent to the gas chambers.
"He had a look that said 'I am the power,'" said one survivor. When it was reported that one block was infested with lice, Mengele ordered the 750 women that lived inside the dormitories to be gassed.
Human experimentation
Block 10 – Medical experimentation block in AuschwitzMengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in identical twins; they would be selected and placed in special barracks. He recruited Berthold Epstein, a Jewish pediatrician, and Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish pathologist, to assist with his experiments.
As a doctor, Epstein proposed to Mengele a study into treatments of the disease called noma that was noted for particularly affecting children from the camp. While the exact cause of noma remains uncertain, it is now known that it has a higher occurrence in children suffering from malnutrition and a lower immune system response. Many develop the disease shortly after contracting another illness such as measles or tuberculosis.
Mengele took an interest in physical abnormalities discovered among the arrivals at the concentration camp. These included dwarfs, notably the Ovitz family – the children of a Romanian artist, seven of whom were dwarfs. Prior to their deportation, they toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe. Mengele often called them "my dwarf family"; to him they seemed to be the perfect expression of "the abnorm".
Mengele's experiments also included attempts to change eye colour by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs, and other surgeries. Rena Gelissen's account of her time in Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls, performing sterilization and shock treatments. Most of the victims died, because of either the experiments or later infections.
"Once Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Roma twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then injected chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each piece of the twins' bodies."
At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of studies on twins. After an experiment was over, the twins were usually killed and their bodies dissected. He supervised an operation by which two Roma children were sewn together to create conjoined twins; the hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had been resected; this also caused gangrene.
The subjects of Mengele's research were better fed and housed than ordinary prisoners and were, for the time being, safe from the gas chambers, although many experiments resulted in more painful deaths. When visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself as "Uncle Mengele" and offered them sweets. Some survivors remember that despite his grim acts, he was also called "Mengele the protector".
The book Children of the Flames, by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Shiela Cohn Dekel, chronicles Mengele's medical experimental activities on approximately 1,500 pairs of twins who passed through the Auschwitz death camp during World War II until its liberation at the end of the war. Only 100 pairs of twins survived; 60 years later, they came forward about the special privileges they were given in Auschwitz owing to Mengele's interest in twins, and how as a result they have suffered, as the children who survived his medical experiments and injections.
Mengele also sought out pregnant women, on whom he would perform vivisections before sending them to the gas chambers.
Auschwitz prisoner Alex Dekel has said: "I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself believed he was doing serious work – not from the slipshod way he went about it. He was only exercising his power. Mengele ran a butcher shop – major surgeries were performed without anaesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation – Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anaesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again without anaesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him – why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part."
An Auschwitz prisoner doctor has said: "He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives, and to do things we would genuinely admire.... And then, next to that,... the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there. Well, that is where the anomaly lay."
After Auschwitz
The SS abandoned the Auschwitz camp on January 27, 1945, and Mengele transferred to Gross Rosen camp in Lower Silesia, again working as camp physician. Gross Rosen was dissolved at the end of February when the Red Army was close to taking it. Mengele worked in other camps for a short time and, on May 2, joined a Wehrmacht medical unit led by Hans Otto Kahler, his former colleague at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Bohemia. The unit hurried west to avoid being captured by the Soviets and were taken as prisoners of war by the Americans. Mengele, initially registered under his own name, was released in June 1945 with papers giving his name as "Fritz Hollmann". From July 1945 until May 1949, he worked as a farmhand in a small village near Rosenheim, Bavaria, staying in contact with his wife and his old friend Hans Sedlmeier, who arranged Mengele's escape to Argentina via Innsbruck, Sterzing, Meran, and Genoa. Mengele may have been assisted by the ODESSA network.
In South America
In Buenos Aires, Mengele at first worked in construction, but soon came in contact with influential Germans, who allowed him an affluent lifestyle in subsequent years. He also got to know other Nazis in Buenos Aires, such as Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Adolf Eichmann. In 1955, he bought a 50 percent share of Fadro Farm, a pharmaceutical company; the same year, he divorced his wife, Irene. Three years later, he married Martha Mengele in Uruguay, the widow of his younger brother, Karl Jr.; she then went to Argentina with her 14-year-old son, Dieter. Mengele lived with his family in a German-owned boarding house in the Buenos Aires suburb of Vicente Lopez from 1958 to 1960. While in Buenos Aires, Mengele practiced medicine, specializing in illegal abortions, and was briefly detained by police on one occasion for the death of a patient during an abortion.
He was doing well in South America, yet Mengele feared being captured, especially after news of Eichmann's capture and subsequent trial were revealed. Thus, he left Argentina in 1962 and moved to Paraguay after managing to get a Paraguayan passport in the name of "José Mengele".
Shortly after the capture of Eichmann in May 1960 by the Israeli Mossad, Mengele was spotted at his home. Agents of Mossad debated whether or not also to kidnap him. However, they still had Eichmann in a safe house inside Argentina, and determined that it would not be possible to conduct another operation at the same time. By the time Eichmann had been brought out of the country, Mengele had escaped to Paraguay.
Isser Harel, Chief Executive of the Secret Services of Israel (1952–1963), personally presided over the successful effort to capture Eichmann in Buenos Aires. In his account of the operation, he reports no sightings of Mengele in 1960, but feels that they might have got him if they could have moved more quickly. When asked about the secondary target by the co-pilot who helped transport Eichmann at the time, he claims to have told him that "had it been possible to start the operation several weeks earlier, Mengele might also have been on the plane." They checked on the last known location for Mengele in Argentina, but he had apparently moved on just two weeks prior.
Mengele hoped that Paraguay would be safer for him, as dictator Alfredo Stroessner was of German descent and even recruited former Nazis to help the country develop. Among other locations in Paraguay, he lived on the outskirts of Hohenau, a German colony north of Encarnación in the department of Itapúa.
According to a senior Mossad man, Israel had received reports that Mengele was in Brazil, but they kept this information to themselves. The Six-Day War in 1967 forced concentration of resources. But after the war, Israel decided to open an embassy in Asunción, Paraguay – perhaps an ideal base from which to pursue Mengele. But Benjamin Weiser Varon, Israeli ambassador from 1968–1972, was "not given any instructions by the foreign office on Mengele of any kind. It wasn't even mentioned."
"I must confess I was not so eager to find Mengele. He presented a dilemma. Israel had less of a claim for his extradition than Germany. He was, after all, a German citizen who had committed his crimes in the name of the Third Reich. None of his victims were Israeli—Israel came into existence only several years later."
The same year, Mengele moved to Nova Europa, about 200 km (120 mi) outside São Paulo, where he lived with Hungarian refugees Geza and Gitta Stammer, working as manager of their farm. In the seclusion of his Brazilian hideaway Mengele was safe. In 1974, when his relationship with the Stammer family was coming to an end, Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Wolfgang Gerhard discussed relocating Mengele to Bolivia where he could spend time with Klaus Barbie, but Mengele rejected this proposal. Instead, he lived in a bungalow in a suburb of São Paulo for the last years of his life. In 1977, his only son Rolf, never having known his father before, visited him there and found an unrepentant Nazi who claimed that he "had never personally harmed anyone in his whole life".
Mengele's health had been deteriorating for years, and he died on February 7, 1979, in Bertioga, Brazil, where he accidentally drowned or possibly suffered a stroke while swimming in the Atlantic. He was buried in Embu das Artes under the name "Wolfgang Gerhard", whose ID card he had used since 1976.
Mengele showed little regret or remorse for his crimes, and expressed in a letter his astonishment and disgust over the remorseful position taken by Hitler's chief architect and Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer.
Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa speculated in his 2008 biography that Mengele, under the alias Rudolph Weiss, continued his human experimentation in South America and as a result of these experiments, a municipality in Brazil, Cândido Godói, has a very high birthrate of twin children: one in five pregnancies, with a substantial amount of the population looking Nordic. His theory was rejected by Brazilian scientists who had studied twins living in the area; they suggested genetic factors within that community as a more likely explanation.
Manhunt
Mengele was listed on the Allies' list of war criminals as early as 1944. His name was mentioned in the Nuremberg trials several times, but Allied forces were convinced that Mengele was dead, which was also claimed by Irene and the family in Günzburg. In 1959, suspicions had grown that he was still alive, given his divorce from Irene in 1955 and his marriage to Martha in 1958. An arrest warrant was issued by the West German authorities. Subsequently, West German attorneys such as Fritz Bauer, Israel's Mossad, and private investigators such as Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld followed the trail of the "Angel of Death". The last confirmed sightings of Mengele placed him in Paraguay, and it was believed that he was still hiding there, allegedly protected by flying ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel and possibly even by the dictator President Alfredo Stroessner. Mengele sightings were reported all over the world, but they turned out to be false.
In 1985, the West German police raided Hans Sedlmeier's house in Günzburg and seized address books, letters, and papers hinting at the grave in Embu. The remains of "Wolfgang Gerhard" were exhumed on June 6, 1985 and identified as Mengele's with high probability by forensic experts from UNICAMP. Rolf Mengele issued a statement saying that he "had no doubt it was the remains of his father". Everything was kept quiet "to protect those who knew him in South America", Rolf said. In 1992, a DNA test confirmed Mengele's identity. He had evaded capture for 34 years.
After the exhumation, the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine stored his remains and attempted to repatriate them to the remaining Mengele family members, but the family rejected them. The bones have been stored at the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine since.
In the 21st century
On September 17, 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released photographs taken from a photo album of Auschwitz staff, which contained eight photographs of Mengele. These eight photos of Mengele are the first authenticated pictures of him at Auschwitz, museum officials said.
In February 2010, Mengele's diary, kept from 1960 until his death in 1979, which included letters sent to Rolf and Wolfgang Gerhard was sold at auction in Connecticut by Alexander Autographs for an estimated $100,000 (£60,000). According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) the buyer was an East Coast Jewish philanthropist who wished to remain anonymous. The auction caused protest amongst some Holocaust survivors, describing it as "a cynical act of exploitation aimed at profiting from the writings of one of the most heinous Nazi criminals."[35] The previous owner, who acquired the diary in Brazil, is said to be close to the Mengele family.
POR: YOUTUBE Y WIKIPEDIA
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